This One Chart Shows How Crazy Trump’s Climate Positions Are

Now that the results from Super Tuesday
are in, we can officially pivot to considering Donald Trump as the most
likely Republican presidential nominee. November will see a Trump v.
Clinton or a Trump v. Sanders face-off, barring a few, impressively
over-analyzed scenarios.

With that in mind, ThinkProgress wanted to revisit our climate and energy candidate chart, where we help voters understand where candidates stand.

We have updated the Democratic candidates, now whittled to only
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, by breaking out Atlantic and Gulf
offshore drilling and including new data on fossil fuel donations, and
we added a few lines that reflect some of Trump’s more aggressive energy
and climate positions.

The Republican candidate has been remarkably mum on climate issues —
perhaps because, as he has repeatedly Tweeted, Trump believes climate change is a hoax. (He also may or may not believe that the hoax is perpetrated by the Chinese.)

Of course, taken in the aggregate, Trump’s positions are pretty much in line with much of his party. While polls show that the majority of Republican voters favor carbon reductions, the mere idea of climate change is largely met with ridicule by Republican leaders.

None of the remaining Republican candidates
accept the scientific consensus that humans are contributing to global
warming that, left unchecked, will be devastating for life as we know
it, raising sea levels, disrupting weather patterns, and triggering
increased drought and flooding.

But in recent months, there appears to have been some thawing (no pun intended) on the fringes of the Republican party. Eleven Republican House representatives
sided with the pope and signed a resolution to act on climate last
fall. Then, this winter, one Democratic and one Republican
representative launched the bipartisan House Climate Caucus.
As pundits are widely predicting a renewed self-evaluation by the
Republican party following the impressive outsider juggernaut Trump has
become, it’s worth considering the idea that, perhaps, the party’s
divergence from science and technology will soften in years to come.
Ironically, this would be a return to form. Former President George H.
W. Bush’s administration considered climate change an urgent and important issue — and one that offered an opportunity for the United States to lead.

At the moment, opposition to the mere idea of climate change is so
ingrained in some corners of the party, Republican candidates and
supporters also can use climate denial as a campaign point.